The VC-funded site is counting on a "refined and advanced" version of the pay-for-performance advertising model that competitors such as FindWhat.com have used to drive revenue. The business model is this: through real-time auctions, merchants bid for placement ranking with specific keywords and/or category listings and pay-per-click, or every time a consumer goes to their site. The higher the merchant bids, the higher their rank in the search results.
"Merchants can control all aspects of their listing, from placement position to product and service descriptions, in real-time, providing a new level of flexibility and speed to the emerging cost-per-click advertising model," says CEO Jim Beriker. "We're going to take advantage of what we see is a flaw in the CPM model. It just doesn't work for advertisers anymore. We want to deliver advertisers targeted consumers and we want to deliver them as quickly as possible from our site to their site. Stickiness is not important in our business model."
In addition to offering paid merchant listings, Search123 also includes listings relevant to a consumer's search from a hard-indexed database of the web's 500 most popular sites along with full web search results from Google.com and the Open Directory Project. Beriker says meetings with potential clients have been positive, especially with dot-coms that are looking for a low cost of entry into new marketing programs.
"E-commerce companies still have a business to run," he said. "We're going to help them get back to business."
Beriker said that the site is in soft launch and marketing efforts will be rolled out after the business model is presented to advertisers. No time frame was provided.
_1.jpg)
.jpg)
